Fill yer tanks!

I’ve been out of the UK for the past 6 days so I’m a little out of the loop, but let me just see if I’ve got this right. The current Prime Minister was slipping into the mire with ugly revelations about dodgy donors dinners in Downing Street. I wasn’t surprised, we’ve all known grubby back handers from big corporations have a massive influence on policy. It’s not party political, all parties (other than possibly the Greens) are guilty of the same deep and soul-destroying corruption.

But this was a bit too obvious and nasty, Dave C did a bit of wriggling and excuse making but it wasn’t working, then the fuel tanker drivers handed him an excuse on a silver platter.

If you are Prime Minister and you’ve spent your life doing PR and you say ‘drivers should just top up their tanks and not worry about it’ you know what you’re doing.

It’s calculated, it’s been mulled over, the possible public reaction to this statement had been assessed and sure enough, the moronic Mail readers, fed a constant diet of fear and anxiety about foreigners, communist truck drivers and evil social workers waiting to take away your children responded by sitting in queues outside filling stations where there was no shortage like a row of brain dead numpties. Should I really be blaming the great British driver with our legendary foresight and innate intelligence? What about, as I’m sure I’ll get a Tweet to remind me to feel guilty, what about the mum taking her sick child to hospital who had nearly run out of petrol and had no choice?

What was incredible though was that there was no shortage, there was no need to panic buy, the tanker drivers didn’t go on strike and the spotlight of our proud British media was turned off Dave and his money grubbing crawling to large donors popping in for a take away at Number 10. Job done.

However, the flip side of this event was the innate fragility of our dependence on the fuel regular readers know I love to harp on about. Mr One-Note Samba starts to parp-parp-parp on his little tune. Maybe we need parp-parp-parp to think about parp-parp-parp our dependence on a fuel supply parp-parp-parp that is at best going to get ridiculously expensive and parp-parp-parp at worst just going to run out.

The non-existent fuel shortage instantly sent the country into a tailspin. How can we even live without our cars, how can we survive for 10 minutes without driving! Arrrgh, 2012, it’s the end of life as we know it! One old Etonian says ‘fill yer tanks’ and everyone feels nauseous with fear.

Energy independence, from national to community level, from huge industrial generating plant to a solar array on your roof, a wind turbine at the end of your street, a geothermal plant by the playing fields, a micro-nuclear facility buried in the ground near the re-cycling depot would change the way we operate.

It’s not a cure all, it would bring up fresh new problems and issues but a huge amount of our fragile transport and energy infrastructure would without doubt be more resilient to the vagaries of well dodgy UK politicians and even more dodgy Middle Eastern regimes. I’m #justsayin’